Do Not Admit Their Labels

On 29^th August BBC News At Ten headlined with a report on the conviction of the killer of a fifteen-year-old girl in a town in the northeast of England. 

The report gave details of the number of times the victim was stabbed and of the fact that the knife used was broken during the attack. An image was shown of the weapon, lined up against a tape measure. 

It goes without saying that what was described in this report is appalling. But it was not at first clear why it should headline on the flagship news programme of the state broadcaster. No mention was made of a failure in policing, or a lapse in social care, or any other factor of broader public import. 

Has the BBC descended to the wanton sensationalism of the gutter press, for which filling its audience with horror is its own justification? 

Or is the BBC engaged in a more targeted campaign of demoralisation of the people forced to fund it? 

In the thick of many grim details, the BBC report made a small insertion – a by-the-way remark, a contingent detail, an aside. 

The killer, who has a diagnosis of autism,…

This report was no mere sensationalism. It was an assault on its audience, to further instill in them that mix of hopelessness and helplessness that makes them ready applicants to centrally administered solutions of every kind.  

One in 100 children in the UK has a diagnosis of autism, a condition that is everywhere characterised by the alleged spectrum of its symptoms and the alleged uncertainty of its outcomes. 

On the evening of 29^th August, in how many households into which the state broadcaster transmitted details of a terrible crime in a small town did a shiver run down the spines of parents, whose child had that day sapped their energy once again on account of a lack of attunement to the world so profound that even those to whom the child is dearest feel unsure of him? 

In how many households did the BBC cruelly ratchet up, in those already stretched to exhaustion, a defenceless foreboding of a future in which a child under their roof would commit a heinous act? 

My own child with a diagnosis of autism was upstairs in bed as I watched BBC News At Ten in my parents’ house. The report, with its insidious aside, chilled me as it must have chilled many. 

But there is nothing to shake off a chill-like exertion. So here is a pushback, against another BBC attack on its own people:

Transhumanism is mostly discussed as involving chips for extracting data and ports for injecting drugs. The human as an interface for digital and chemical control. 

But transhumanism can work without chips and ports. It can work with labels, those labels applied to us by professionals in institutions, those labels for which many of us clamour for ourselves and our children, those labels which help us to ‘understand’ – Ah, that’s what it is…autism. 

With the label in place, all kinds of effects are provided with a landing pad inside our homes, inside our most intimate relations, inside ourselves. The human as an interface for corporate control. 

Once your child has a diagnosis of autism, behaviour that is not compatible with social life, behaviour that guarantees the exclusion of your child from worldly flourishing, ceases to be worked on, challenged, improved. Compulsive eating, incessant noise, spinning, flapping, rocking, tantrums, ear defenders, non-stop screens…all become acceptable, though they assure a dysfunctional future. 

Accounts of ‘sensory overload’ license the removal of your child from worldly settings, while the promise of ‘inclusion’ encourages you to hold out for the day when the world will make your child at home, which day will never come. 

Meanwhile, once your child has a diagnosis of autism, any lingering confidence in your own ability to shape his future is destroyed. The highly advertised spectrum of symptoms and uncertain outcomes reposition you as an onlooker to your child’s development.

Even the moral formation of your child, even their chance of growing into a good person, becomes a matter in respect of which you are helpless and increasingly without hope.  

Once your child has a diagnosis of autism, you are vulnerable to state-sponsored nudging of the kind exemplified egregiously by the BBC news report, prone to regarding your own child as an alien beyond your grasp, as likely as not to turn on the world or to turn on you, a cuckoo in your nest. 

Do not heed this subliminal messaging. Do not be nudged. Your child with a diagnosis of autism will not turn on the world and will not turn on you because you can teach him how to be good.

If your child with a diagnosis of autism is resistant to moral formation, it is not because of the spectrum of his symptoms and the uncertainty of their outcomes. It is because today’s version of moral formation is weak and not to be trusted. 

Not only that, the ways in which your child with a diagnosis of autism is unavailable for moral formation reveal how to restore the process of moral formation to the benefit of us all. 

Nowadays to be good is mostly inculcated in two ways. 

First, it is taught with general principles that grow more abstract with every passing year, so abstract that they cease to apply in any determinate manner to any particular action in the world. 

The ‘Together Apart’ slogan of Covid and the ‘Heart-to-Heart’ campaign for organ donation are examples – empty rhetoric, corporate nonsense with no applicable significance. 

Second, morality is taught as the promotion of what is called ‘kindness,’ which is urged upon us everywhere without elaboration, a feeling that we are simply presumed to possess, a sentimental reach-out to other humans, animals, and the world. 

But neither abstraction nor affection is a sound foundation for moral life. 

Being good cannot be deduced from abstract principles, though general maxims may provide practical summaries or reminders. For, abstract principles require to be applied, and between theory and application there is space for an almost infinity of interests and interpretations. 

Neither can being good depend upon feeling, even a feeling as apparently humane as kindness. Feeling is uncertain – what if we don’t feel kind today? ‘Random acts of kindness’ is a familiar meme and expresses an essential truth. Feeling is random, unreliable, and cannot be the bedrock of moral life. 

We may establish a veneer of morality with theories and sentiments. We may parrot the slogans while we obediently follow their rules; or we may put on a show of feeling while we obediently follow their rules. But following their rules does not make us good people. 

Children with a diagnosis of autism likely do not achieve this veneer. They do not see the significance of abstract principles – this is why they are excluded by mainstream curricula, which translate every possibility into an abstract lesson. And they are incapable of sentiment themselves and unmoved by sentiment in others – this is why they present as affectless, face without expression, tone flat, robotic. 

But there is a way to prepare your child with a diagnosis of autism for moral life. What is more, it is the only way to really prepare any child for moral life. Practice. 

Your child with a diagnosis of autism can learn to be a good person, by forming good habits and following good examples.

Hug them when they are hurt. Teach them to hug you. Overdo it so it imprints. Again and again, so they gradually get on board. Call their attention to the crying baby. Show them how sorry you are for its small sufferings. Again and again. Furrow your brow until they reach out to trace the lines with their finger. Let them hear a soft tone of voice, and a harsh one. Again and again. Clap with them at others’ triumphs; chide them for their impatience and frustration. Again and again…  

It is like shaping a piece of dough, or like many other physical tasks. The elasticity works against you, pulling back from you, undoing your good work. But it yields at last and is the very thing to finally sustain the desired form. 

Neither one-time transmission of abstract theory nor passive reliance on native feeling, teaching any child to be good requires repetition and example, lived repetition and lived example over time. Your child with a diagnosis of autism does nothing more or less than make this requirement very clear.   

In defiance of the BBC and their sinister agenda, I say to those with a child like mine – a child who is not easily worlded and not easily kept worlded: 

Do not admit their labels, which are only a portal to helplessness. Do not adopt their strategies, which are only furtherance of dysfunction. Do not enter upon the terrible project of ‘inclusion,’ which is only a guarantee of hopeless exclusion from the world and from other people. 

Your child is your child. Form habits with him. Be an example to him. For years and years. And then you may rely on him implicitly, much more than if his moral life were determined by theory or by feeling. 

I once attended a talk by Temple Grandin, author of The Autistic Brain. She spoke of having given a presentation in Silicon Valley to parents of children with a diagnosis of autism. She said that one of the parents there asked her, ‘How do we know that our children care about us?’ – what an expression of helplessness that was! 

Temple Grandin told us her reply: ‘If your house is on fire, they will help you to get out.’ 

No corporate slogans. No gush of sentiment. Just unerring goodness. The effect of a lifetime of practice. 

Sinéad Murphy’s new book, ASD: Autistic Society Disorder, is now available.